Saturday, March 1, 2014

Weekly summary: It was a wild one

NotSpot King of the Week

When 60 stations empty, that's news

This was, in the annals of BikeShareNYC, a wild week. We recorded the most empty stations of the year, 60, on Monday morning. A tweet announcing the NotSpot record caught the attention of NYToday, resulting in our first media mention. See New York Today: Biking Through the SnowBetter yet, and far be it from us to cite cause and effect, the day following the NYToday piece, the NotSpot numbers started dropping precipitously. By Saturday at 7:30 pm we recorded only 10 empty stations. We hadn’t seen a number that low since Jan. 20. See the Empty Stations Day by Day chart if you’re craving more detail.

Bike count bumps up 1K

The number of available bikes started rising last Sunday when the count stood at nearly 3400. By Saturday there were 1,000 more available.

The highest we’ve recorded is 5674 on Jan. 18.

Top 10 NotSpots, by station and neighborhood

And for the entree, the Top 10 NotSpots in Manhattan and Brooklyn

Manhattan

WEEK 8

NEIGHBORHOOD

STATION

NOTSPOT HOURS THIS YEAR

NOTSPOT HOURS THIS WEEK

1

Hells Kitchen

W 52 St & 9 Ave

282

26

2

Hells Kitchen

W 54 St & 9 Ave

259

45

3

Midtown North

W 49 St & 5 Ave

244

0

4

Midtown North

W 37 St & 5 Ave

226

10

5

Tudor City

E 43 St & 2 Ave

178

0

6

Midtown North

E 53 St & Madison Ave

153

0

7

Lower East Side

Clinton St & Grand St

152

4

8

Midtown North

W 44 St & 5 Ave

149

0

9

Midtown East

E 51 St & Lexington Ave

149

0

10

Civic Center

Centre St & Chambers St

149

12

What we’re seeing in Manhattan is a repeat offenders list. For this season anyway, it’s getting harder to break into the Top 10. W 52 St & 9 Ave retains the top position for a second week. And Centre St & Chambers St is back on the list after a well deserved week off.

But the most interesting numbers are in Hours This Week. We did not record any down time at five of the big NotSpots, reinforcing our notion that the system operators are beginning to get aggressive about the chronic outages at these stations.

Brooklyn

WEEK 8 BROOKLYN

NEIGHBORHOOD

STATION

NOTSPOT HOURS THIS YEAR

NOTSPOT HOURS THIS WEEK

1

Downtown

Clinton St & Tillary St

365

38

2

Downtown

Cadman Plaza E & Tillary St

266

0

3

Williamsburg

S 3 St & Bedford Ave

216

0

4

Brooklyn Heights

Columbia Heights & Cranberry St

201

20

5

Fort Greene

DeKalb Ave & S Portland Ave

190

17

6

Bedford-Stuyvesant

Hancock St & Bedford Ave

184

16

7

Bedford-Stuyvesant

Lexington Ave & Classon Ave

182

44

8

Clinton Hill

DeKalb Ave & Vanderbilt Ave

180

2

9

Clinton Hill

Washington Ave & Greene Ave

154

20

10

Fort Greene

Myrtle Ave & St Edwards St

128

26

Clinton & Tillary leads the pack for a third straight week. This list, too, is calcifying with only one change in entrants, Myrtle Ave & St Edwards. And both Myrtle and St. Edward have been around the block before.

The recent magic in Manhattan has not spread its pixie dust across the river.

Now, the neighborhood Top 10

Manhattan

WEEK 8

NEIGHBORHOOD

TOTAL STATIONS

TOTAL DOCKS

NOTSPOT HOURS

MINUTES PER DOCK

1

Lower East Side

18

518

129

15

2

Times Square

8

422

105

15

3

Hells Kitchen

14

464

87.5

11

4

Tompkins Square

13

403

57.5

9

5

Stuyvesant Town

4

138

19

8

6

Flatiron

5

194

23

7

7

East Village

10

378

29

5

8

Chinatown

5

180

13.5

5

9

Civic Center

3

121

7.5

4

10

Midtown North

15

661

36

3

The Lower East Side, after making the Top 10 list for six of its eight week history, finally achieves Lesserness.

The Times Square numbers are weird, some stations being knocked out of service for New Years, others for the Super Bowl. What’s becoming apparent is that when bikes are loaded in Times Square stations they skedaddle, le plus rapide.

Brooklyn

WEEK 8

NEIGHBORHOOD

TOTAL STATIONS

TOTAL DOCKS

NOTSPOT HOURS

MINUTES PER DOCK

1

Fort Greene

20

584

264

27

2

Bedford-Stuyvesant

9

205

71

21

3

Clinton Hill

9

249

69.5

17

4

Brooklyn Heights

8

255

71

17

5

Downtown

9

290

61.5

13

Fort Greene goes on and off the list, but this week it really got slammed.

Brooklyn’s minute-per-dock number for the week is almost twice as bad as Manhattan’s -- 17 minutes versus nine. (We’ll get to using MPD pretty shortly.)

Yes, February was 22% worse than January

And now, we introduce yet another stat -- monthly comparisons. Our view is that performance of the bike-sharing system degraded by 22% in February compared to January. And we don’t think January’s performance will become the gold standard.

We get to the 22% number by dividing the total number of NotSpot hours recorded by the total numbers of docks involved. Why docks? ‘Cause every station’s different, that’s why.

So minutes per dock is the common denominator we use to make sense of it all. We know, minutes per dock is a hard number to wrap your head around. The docks seem perfectly content whether or not they’re entertaining a bicycle. But trust us. Minutes per dock were 9 in January, 11 in Feb. 22% longer down time across the system.

Changes on the blog

We reorganized the section that contains photos of various stations into neighborhood categories. See links on right rail. And in doing so, we had a Light Dawns Over Marble Head moment, realizing that we're never going to be able to visit all 331 stations.